Please contact the department for course description.

Top of Page

ANTHROPOLOGY 100g
Principles of Human Organization: Non-Western Societies
Professor Moore
MW, 8:00 - 9:30

This course is designed to look at both universal social organizational themes and their culture-specific variations. We do so by reading and discussing the ethnographies (holistic descriptions of a particular society's cultural tenets and folk ways) of five non-western societies. Having gained an overview of each society in the first third of the course, the next two-thirds of the semester is devoted to cross-cultural comparisons of eight of the societies' shared principles of organization (kinship and family, belief, political, law, and economic systems as well as their understandings of medicine and health, time and them selves as evolving social entities across time, space and intercultural contact.) In the past, Dr. Weibel-Orlando has lectured about the Trobriand Islanders of the Western Pacific, the Yanomano of So. Venezuela, the Cheyennes of Colorado, the Nuer of the So. Sudan, and a Hindi agrarian village in No. India.

Readings and Assignments:
The students are expected to read relevant portions of a classic ethnography about each of the cultures under exploration. Weekly reading assignments average about 50 pages. There are two, in-class mid-term tests and one final test given during exam week. Each test is worth 20 percent of the final grade. A comparative term paper of not less than 10 pages is due the 12th week of class. It, too, constitutes 20 percent of the grade. Discussion group attendance is mandatory. Ones attendance record and intellectual participation in discussion group are evaluated at the end of the semester and constitute 20 percent of the final grade.

Note: The readings and assignments list may be subject to change. Please contact the department for verification.

Top of Page

ANTHROPOLOGY 263g
Exploring Culture Through Film
Professor Seaman
TTh, 8:00 - 9:30
TTh, 9:30 - 11:00

The main objective of this course is to provide students with an idea of the case study method in anthropology through intensive viewing of films and photographs about non-Western people whose culture is also well-represented in ethnographic texts. We will focus on three cultures: the !Kung San or Ju/'hoansi (Bushmen) of Southern Africa, the Yanomamö Indians of Venezuela, and the Tiv of Nigeria. Up until very recent times, all of these cultures lacked the political institutions characteristic of the state or empires and thus provide examples of peoples for whom power and authority are largely imbedded within the categories of family, friend or foe. Up until the 1980s, some Ju/'hoansi lived in small, localized bands supported by a primarily hunting and gathering ecology. The Yanomamö represent a 'big-man" type of social system and they still retains some autonomy because of their remote location; they are ecologically dependent upon slash-and-burn agriculture and some hunting. The Tiv are market-oriented hoe agriculturalists whose traditional segmentary lineage system was capable of mobilizing thousands of people in feuds, wars and judicial proceedings. The Tiv and the Yanomamö are examples the kind of peoples usually called 'tribal', even though their scale of social integration differs greatly. All of these peoples have been studied extensively by anthropologists and each has also been the subject of a series of ethnographic films or photographic essays. The Kung San by John Marshall; the Yanomamo by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon; the Tiv by Paul Bohannan. Recently Peter Biella and Gary Seaman collaborated with Chagnon to produce a computer interactive study on the Yanomamo entitled The Ax Fight. A similar project is underway for the Tiv. We therefore possess detailed written and filmed ethnographies of these three peoples as well as interactive media resources. It is these films and texts and interactive media that will allow us to form some sense of what it is like to live and act in a Ju/'hoansi or Yanomamo or Tiv mode.

A second important course objective is to learn to relate written materials to the audiovisual information contained in filmic and visual media. To accomplish this, the student is required to maintain a structured 'film journal' to transfer information from visual to textual format. A model form to organize the journal will be provided. These journals will be done in the discussion sections at the end of every class period.

Required Texts:
* Chagnon, Napoleon. Yanomamö, (5th edition)
* Biella, Chagnon and Seaman. Yanomamö Interactive (CD-ROM)
* Lee, Richard. The Dobe Ju/'hoansi (2nd edition)
* Bohannan, Paul. Social Anthropology of the Tiv (Reader)

Grades and Assignments:
Grades are based on 2 film journals (30%), one midterm objective type examination (20%), one short term paper (30%), and a final objective type examination (20%). Handouts will describe in detail the film journal and the term paper assignments.

Note: For another ANTH 263g section, see the next two entries.

Top of Page

ANTHROPOLOGY 263g
Exploring Culture Through Film
Professor Simic
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

This course will introduce the student to the subject matter and theories of social anthropology through the extensive use of visual media, especially through film. Topics will cover a spectrum of issues, including: marriage and the family; economics; ritual and religion; conflict and conflict resolution; and culture change, among others. The approach will be broadly comparative. Traditions covered in the course will include those of Africa, Latin America, and the Balkaus, among others.

Readings and Assignments:
Course readings will vary from semester to semester, but will usually include four books. Course requirements are: a midterm, final, film journals, and a term paper.

Top of Page

ANTHROPOLOGY 263g
Exploring Culture Through Film
Professor Boehm
TTh, 3:30 - 5:00

Please contact the Anthropology department for course description.

Top of Page

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 110g
East Asian Humanities: The Great Tradition
Professor Hayden
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

This course introduces the fundamental humanistic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea through representative works of traditional literature, esthetics, social philosophy, religion, and historical writing. The readings are mostly from primary sources as translated into English. No previous knowledge of an East Asian culture or language is expected.

Readings and Assignments:
* de Bary, W. T., et al. Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. I
* Birch, Cyril, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature, vol. I
* Tsunoda, R., et al., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. I
* Keene, Donald, ed., Anthology of Japanese Literature
* Lee, Peter H., W.T. de Bary, ed., Sources of Korean Tradition, vol. I

Note: The readings and assignments may be subject to change. Please contact the department for verification.

Top of Page

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 342g
Japanese Literature and Culture
Professor Bialock
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

The objective of this course is to explore fundamental patterns in the culture and civilization of Japan through an examination of key literary, historical, religious, and philosophical texts from the ancient through modern periods. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which issues of gender, power, and class have shaped the production of Japanese literature. Since standard narratives of Japan's cultural past have been heavily influenced by Japan's emergence as a modern nation state, attention will also be paid to how the cultural dialogue and conflict between Japan and the West that accompanied modernization have shaped both Japanese and western views of Japan's evolution as a civilization. Issues discussed in this course will include the role of myth, story-telling, and historical narrative; conceptions of authority as reflected in evolving notions of imperial, sacred, and secular power; the role of ritual, performance and sociality in Japanese literary and art forms, with specific comparisons to western theatrical and novelistic traditions; the centrality of aesthetics in Japanese self-identity; concepts of self, gender, and otherness, with comparisons to western notions of individuality and subject. The course may also include screenings of several films that require attendance outside normal class time.

Course Requirements and Grading
* 2 Papers: 40%
* Midterm Exam: 20%
* Final Exam: 30%
* Attendance & Participation: 10%

Top of Page

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 350g
Chinese Civilization
Professor Birge
WF, 10:00 - 12:00

This course presents basic features and highlights of Chinese civilization from neolithic times down to the present day. It explores both the development and the continuities of this great civilization, including aspects of philosophy, religion, politics, gender, literature, and art. We will also look at some areas of Chinese culture as it is encountered here in Los Angeles. No prior knowledge of China is required.

Course Requirements & Grading
* Map Exercise: 3%
* I-ching Divination: 5%
* Midterm: 20%
* 2 Term Papers: 40%
* Final Exam: 25%
* Class Attendance & Participation: 7%

Texts
* Conrad, Schirokauer, A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991)
* Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. I (Sources)
* Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life (Penguin Books)
* Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, Son of the Revolution
* Course Reader (available in the bookstore)

Top of Page

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 352g
Chinese Literature and Culture
Professor Hayden
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

This course will introduce traditional Chinese literature through representative works of history, philosophy, poetry, fiction, and drama, as translated into English. No previous knowledge of Chinese culture or language is assumed.

Course Requirements
* Midterm Exam
* 2 Term Papers
* Final Exam

Texts
* Watson, Early Chinese Literature
* Anthology of Chinese Literature from Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, ed. Birch
* Watson, Chinese Lyricism

Top of Page

EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES 150g
East Asian Societies
Professor Rosen
TTh, 2:00 - 4:00

The following course description belongs to Professor Cooper. Please contact the East Asian Area Studies Department for Professor Rosen's course description.

This course is designed to provide an introduction to the societies and cultures of contemporary East Asia. Required readings are ethnographic studies of agricultural and industrial communities in China, Japan, and Korea. Lectures will provide historical and political background to each country. Readings will serve as a basis for discussion of cultural and economic themes and issues in the recent history of each country.

Top of Page

HISTORY 106g
Chinese Lives: An Introduction of Chinese History
Professor Wills
MW, 8:30 - 9:50

This class introduces students to some key themes in the history of China from the origins of the civilization down to our own day. The emphasis is not on volume of material read or facts mastered, but on reading, thinking, and writing. Wills, Mountain of Fame provides some continuity of exposition and introduction to some key themes and problems through the study of a series of famous and infamous lives of individuals in Chinese history. Ebrey, Chinese Civilization gives you a sense of the variety of Chinese experience and the challenges of trying to make sense of sources in translation. Very short writing exercises are required regularly, to give you practice in the kinds of writing and thinking we want you to work on in this course, and to push you to keep up with the readings.

Readings and assignments:
Some kind of writing or exam is due in almost every week of this class. Most are brief and based entirely on assigned readings; all are carefully laid out in course materials and sessions. There are a mid-term exam and a final; two short essays, not over 1000 words; a longer paper, not over 2000 words, due at the end of the class; and short assignments, not over 250 words each, which may be handwritten, and due in most weeks when there is no longer paper or exam.

Top of Page

HISTORY 107g
Japanese History
Professor Berger
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

This course has two essential purposes. The first is to acquaint you with a survey of Japanese history. Our purpose will not be to memorize names, dates and places, but rather to see how a civilization quite different from those of the West evolved, developed, and met human needs. We may thereby learn quite a bit not only about Japan, but about our own cultural traditions. At a time when comparisons between contemporary Japan and America appear daily in the mass media, seeing the patterns of Japanese history may help us understand the patterns of contemporary Japan, and evaluate those comparisons with a more educated eye.

The second purpose is to explore what "history" means as an intellectual discipline, and how materials from other branches of knowledge, such as archaeology, economics, fine arts, literature and political science may be deployed to enrich our understanding of the past. The major cultural traditions explored are Japan's agrarian-village tradition, warrior (samurai) tradition, aristocratic/bureaucratic (court nobility) tradition, and the patterns of embracing or rejecting traditions encountered from foreign sources.

Readings:
* de Bary, et. al. Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume I
* Murasaki Shikibu, Tale of Genji
* Shirokaues, A Brief History of Japanese Civilization
* collected photocopied materials

Assignments:
* Midterm (25% of grade)
* Final Examination (40% of grade)
* Term Paper exploring how a piece of literature, art, or architecture reflects the times in which it was created by the Japanese (35% of grade).

Note: The readings and assignments list may be subject to change. Please contact the department for verification.

Top of Page

HISTORY 324g
Islam in Russia, the USSR and the Successor States
Professor Rorlich
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

The main goal of this class is to equip students with the basic empirical information and analytical approaches that will enable them to understand the dynamics of religion, culture and politics in shaping one of the world's major civilizations. Hence, guided by a comparative perspective, this class focuses on the study of those societies of the former Soviet Union whose identities and cultures were shaped by Islam but also by their encounter with the colonial "other", be it in Tsarist or Soviet form. Given its focus on an area outside the "core" Middle Eastern countries, this course also contributes to a better understanding of the cultural diversity of the "Muslim World" against the background of its unity of faith while also identifying the remarkable diversity of "Russian Islam" forged as it was, by the interaction of the settled and nomadic; urban and rural; Muslim and non-Muslim societies.

This course will begin with a general discussion of Islam as a religion and way of life; it will then turn to its main focus, the exploration of the beliefs, religions practices, cultural traditions, social institutions, and political culture of the Muslims of the former Soviet Union from the tenth century until the emergence of independent states such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhastan, Uzbedistan, and others.

Readings:
* Reader
* A Guillaume, Islam
* R. Bukharev, Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons
* S. Koplik, K. Aruz, P. Steinberger, eds., Central Asia: History, Ethnicity, Modernity
* L. Blanch, Sabres of Paradise
* G. Aitmatov, The Last Days More Than A Hundred Years

Assignments:
* Two Midterms
* Annotated Bibliography
* Book Reviews
* Final

Note: The readings and assignments list may be subject to change. Please contact the department for verification.

Top of Page

RELIGION 131g
Religions of Asia
Professor: TBA
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

This course description belongs to Professor Slingerland.

The purpose of this course is to trace the development of religious thought in India, China and Japan, from earliest times until the present, paying attention to certain recurrent themes or motifs while also taking note of some profound discontinuities, especially as we move from India to East Asia. Although the importance of popular and elite practice as both a complement to and source of innovation in religious thought will be noted, as will the influence exerted by socio-economic and other "non-religious" forces? The primary focus of this course will be trends in religious/philosophical thought, as well as the relevance of these trends for contemporary Western thought.

Course Requirements
Students are expected to attend all lectures as well as a weekly discussion section, where a short paragraph concerning one of the week's readings will be turned in (although not graded). Each student will also be expected to write two papers (6-8 pages each) over the course of the semester, and these papers will require a close familiarity with the assigned readings. It is crucial that the readings be completed by the student, as the lectures merely provide a background to (rather than a synopsis of) the assigned texts. There will also be a midterm and final exam, which will focus primary upon the lecture material and will be open-notes (hardcopy, non-commercial notes only, no books or electronic devices allowed), so careful note-taking in both lecture and while doing the readings is strongly encouraged.

Texts
• Embree, Ainslie (ed.). Sources of Indian Tradition. New York: Columbia, 1988. (SIT)
• Ivanhoe and Van Norden (eds.). Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Seven Bridges Press. (RCP)
• Chan, Wing-tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. (SB)
• Tsunoda Ryusaku et al. (eds.). Sources of Japanese Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. (SJT)
• Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. New York: Weatherhill, 1994. (ZMBM)
• Course Reader. (CR)

Grading**
• Section participation*: 15%
• Short papers: 30% (15% each)
• Midterm: 20%
• Final exam: 35%

* Failure to attend discussion section will be taken very seriously. One unexcused absence will be tolerated, but further unexcused absences will effect the "section participation" portion of the student's grade (not the overall grade) as follows:
                    2 absences: 1 letter grade deduction
                    3 absences: 2 letter grades deduction
                    4 or more: automatic "F".

** Field trips to local religious communities (times and places TBA) will also be arranged; attendance will be optional and for extra credit.

Note: For the most recent course information, see the instructor's website.

Top of Page

RELIGION 133g
Religions of Latin America
Professor Lint Sagarena
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

Please contact the department for course description.

Top of Page

SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 330g
Russian Thought and Civilization
Professor Postoutenko
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

Speaking about Russian culture, people tend to forget about its social, economical and psychological foundations, - in other words, about Russian civilization. This unilateral approach is mostly due to the traditionally acclaimed preference of "spiritual" values over the "material" ones in Russian consciousness. Even if it is true, civilization in Russia never ceased its influence on literature, art and philosophy. In particular, the unique combination of local democracy, tracing back to Middle Ages (Novgorod), and state totalitarianism, having reached its peak in the Soviet time (Stalin), diverted Russian creative forces from politics; instead, Russian writers and painters explored Russian society on the small scale, creating a highly original version of nineteenth-century European realism. On the other hand, the interaction of agriculture, traditionally dominant in Russia, with westernized city culture, resulted in the phenomenon of twentieth-century Russian communism, the combination of folk beliefs and modern philosophy

At first, the course will elaborate the definition of civilization out of traditional yet opposing viewpoints (Henry Louis Morgan, Oswald Spengler). Then we will explore the concepts, linking Russian civilizational background with its cultural representation (Alexander Drankov's movie Fish Factory in Astrakhan, Alexander Pushkin's The Tale of Fisherman and the Golden Fish and The Water-Nymph; Alexander Dovzhenko's movie of the same name). The examination of Russian civilization by outsiders (Astolphe de Custine, Journey of Our Time; John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World) will be compared to inner views of Russian civilization (Nicholai Berdyaev's Origins of Russian Communism; Marina Goldovskaia's movie The Solovki Power). Finally, Russian civilization will be studied through its own controversial attitude towards West (Alexander Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman"; Yuri Mamin's movie Window to Paris).